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Thank you, Greg, and thank you to my fellow panelists. I’m Bryson Meunier, the Director of SEO Strategy at Resolution Media. Some of you may be here because of a directive from the C-suite to figure out this Siri thing and whether or not you should be shifting budgets from SEO to Siri optimization. The answer is no, you shouldn’t. Certainly not in the next five years. However, there are some things that marketers can be doing today to get ahead of their competition, and that’s what I’ll be discussing here today.

So it seems to me that the best way to understand whether or not Siri is a Google killer, or to put it another way, has “Googlecidal” tendencies, is to ask her. So I asked her point blank if she was a Google killer, and she tried to avoid the question.

Some analysts have said that iPhone 5 is a game changer for Siri, as she’ll have access to more information like sports scores, but I asked her if she was a Google killer on iPhone 5 and she dodged the question yet again. So I rephrased the question.

And she sent me to Google.

And this isn’t an isolated episode. According to a study PiperJaffray did this year comparing Siri to Google, Siri sent 60% of the queries that they were given to Google. It’s really hard to displace Google when you are sending so many of your queries to them.

Part of the reason they do this is because Siri is not great at search. For one, she assumes local intent, even when that intent doesn’t exist, and often for queries that are obvious to Google. Here’s the query [freddie mercury], which Google knows is about the lead singer of Queen, but Siri thinks I want to buy a car at a dealership.

And it’s really hard to search for something on Siri if you’re not looking for local information, as Siri assumes you are. Here’s an example of a query I did when I was looking for a gift for my daughter’s first birthday. I was just researching, but Siri assumed that I was ready to buy, and gave me a list of gift shops where I could find something today. But this was all based on the keyword “gift” and at this point Siri is not smart enough to understand that these gift shops are unlikely to have anything that my one year old daughter would like. This type of experience probably begins to explain why Siri received a D (with 68% accuracy) to Google Now’s B+ (with 86% accuracy) in Piper Jaffray’s 1600 question study.

Siri’s difficulty with search is probably why those who use Siri monthly don’t use her to search. According to a survey by Parks Associates of iPhone 4S users, only a third of them use Siri to place phone calls, send text messages or look up information (which includes search). 84% of iPhone 4S users, according to the same study, use Siri on a monthly basis, but a smaller percentage of those users are actually searching with her.

These problems with search are likely to be short-lived. Apple will get better at search, as will Google, and someday we may see the equivalent of IBM’s Jeopardy-winning AI on our smartphones. But for marketers making decisions today, it’s clear that this is at least five years in the future, if not more.

When you think about Siri today, you really need to think about the audience for Siri, and currently it’s extremely limited. Greg showed David Mihm’s quick math. Doing a similar operation you can see that potential search from Siri on iPad and iPhone models with Siri enabled accounts for 2.5% of total traffic.

Right now you can reach these people without doing anything all that different for Siri. The other panelists are going to go into detail on Siri optimization with regard to Yelp et al; but here are four high level best practices.

Those are some of the things you can do to optimize for Siri; but if you want to be optimized for voice search and AI, you also need to think about things like competing apps. Skyvi and Vlingo are two of the most popular. These don’t have the reach even of Siri at this point, but with APIs like Zypr (read: zipper) and AT&amp;T’s speech recognition ‘Watson’ engine, developers now have access to technologies similar to what Siri uses to help them build competing or similar apps. And speaking of, most people at this point know of Google’s Siri-like interface in Jelly Bean called Google Now. Rather than be killed by Siri, it seems Google has adapted its interface to compete with Siri and proved Nietzsche right.

Siri also trains consumers to ask questions that they weren’t able to ask search engines before. This has the potential to add new categories of queries that previously didn’t exist.

There’s no evidence of this currently, but when it comes to understanding how voice search changes search behavior it’s important to look at Maryam Garret of Google’s research called ‘Say What…?’

One of the big findings was that many people choose to search by voice while driving, and their queries indicate that they are en route to somewhere. The implications for user interface designers, the researchers said, is to create an interface that works with hands-free navigation, or one that doesn’t require a lot of interaction to be usable. Marketers and designers can apply this to their own sites this way: if you want to reach voice searchers you should give them a simple mobile user experience that is focused on local information if you have a local business as that’s what the majority of voice searchers are looking for. If you have an adult business, voice search probably shouldn’t be something you should be concerned about at this point.

Similar to the last slide, the researchers also measured what types of results came up most often in voice search, and maps results came up more than any other. If you’re optimizing for Siri, this means Yelp optimization, but for other types of voice search you also want to consider other sources of local information such as Google+ Local. Also, while average query length wasn’t given in this study, the researchers found that voice searchers generally don’t speak queries longer than six words. As the technology improves this may change, but today most people appear to be using voice search like a traditional search engine, but focusing on local information.

Hope this has been valuable for you. If you remember only five things from my presentation, please remember these.

Thanks. I hope this was interesting and educational. If you have any questions, you can contact me here, and I look forward to more discussion at the end of the presentations. Thanks!

SIRI IS NOT A SEARCH
ENGINE Currently Siri gets 60% of its answers from Google (source: PiperJaffray) Proprietary and confidential 5

SIRI IS NOT A SEARCH
ENGINE Siri assumes local intent when the query is not local in nature Proprietary and confidential 6

SIRI IS NOT A SEARCH
ENGINE When in doubt, Siri assumes local intent. Proprietary and confidential 7

SIRI IS NOT A SEARCH
ENGINE Potential Search Usage by Siri Users iPhone 4S Users Who Dont Search with Siri iPhone 4S Users Who Might Search with Siri Roughly a third of 4S owners use Siri to place phone calls, send text messages, or look up information daily or almost daily. (Source: Parks Associates) Proprietary and confidential 8 )

SIRI DOESN’T CURRENTLY HAVE THE
REACH • Siri currently available on iPhone 4S, iPhone 5 (3.78% of total iPhone Percent of Total Market web traffic*) and new iPad (16.82% of total iPad web traffic*). 1.5% 1% • iOS represents 2.86% of web Siri iPad traffic from all operating systems world wide (source: Statcounter) • iPhone search accounts for Siri about 3% of total site traffic iPhone (source: internal client data) All other • iPad search accounts for about devices 4% of total site traffic (source: internal client data) 97.5 Source: Chitika Live Tracker, 9/28/12 Proprietary and confidential 10

VOICE SEARCH CHANGES SEARCH BEHAVIOR
• Maps results most likely to be returned from spoken queries • Queries longer than 6 words more likely to be typed Proprietary and confidential 16

SUMMARY 1. Siri has limited
reach, but is the start of larger trend toward voice search and artificial intelligence 2. Understand relevance of query to user intent and context 3. Optimize for Google, not just Siri 4. Optimize for local search, as voice search users most likely to be looking for information around them 5. Provide a simple, mobile interface, as voice searchers most likely to require a hands-free experience Proprietary and confidential 17